Historically charities have operated local television bingo games once per week with low-value prizes controlled by municipal and state ordinances. The lack of professionalism needed to produce these games, unexciting prize money, infrequency of play and inconvenience of entry has tended to produce television game shows with limited audience appeal. On the other hand large organizations such as state or provincial lottery corporations have not had the means to organize and operate a mass audience television game show that meets their requirements for revenue generation, system integrity, and ease of operation. The objective of this invention is to resolve the problems which inhibit the successful development of a mass audience television game show based on bingo.
In the regular television bingo game the player is required to purchase a bingo card at a local retail store some time prior to game time. The player must then reserve the game viewing time as much as a week in advance from the time the bingo card is purchased. This inhibits ticket sales because the player is not sure if he or she will be available at game time. The player also has to physically be at home and play the game to determine if he or she is a winner, or arrange for someone else to play the bingo card. Players enter only one game at a time and are unable to reschedule games based on their availability. This invention reduces these problems by the use of replayable bingo cards, telephone entry into the game, on demand scheduling and computer-controlled playing of the game.
In the standard television bingo game the winning players telephone the television station to inform the game organizers of their bingo. Multiple players are able to win at the same time and each bingo card must be verbally verified by telephone, which entails twenty five numbers being read back to the verifier for each winning full-card bingo. This process is time consuming, boring for the television audience and prone to both error and pranks since the verification calls are made to a publicly announced telephone number. Pranksters can easily declare a false bingo which interrupts the game for other legitimate players. The day after playing the bingo game the organizers have the expense of sending a staff member to personally verify each winning bingo card and paying out the prize money. The current invention seeks to eliminate all of this manual verification process.
The physical problems of delivering bingo cards to retailers, collecting and controlling the cash, the confusion in the players' minds as to which card is to be played for which game, and the possibility of fraud and pranksters all contribute to the difficulty of expanding the current style of bingo to a mass audience game show covering many cities with game frequencies up to every half hour. This invention eliminates the need to deal with cash or physically distribute bingo cards for each game.
With other lotteries and games of chance operated by the states and provinces, expensive lottery terminals or other input devices such as on-line poker screens are required. These have to be placed in heavy traffic locations to provide economic access to large numbers of potential players. This invention does not require expensive terminal devices because it uses the telephone and television set which are conveniently available in most consumers' homes.
In many computer systems with Touch Tone input, the users have to input substantial amounts of data for each transaction, which can lead to input error, user frustration and extended telephone connect time. Tedious playback verification of the correctness of the input is necessary to maintain the integrity of the system even though time consuming and costly. This invention seeks to reduce player input to a minimum while maintaining data integrity.
The availability of large prize money and the broad geographic coverage of a mass audience bingo game make the prevention and detection of fraud an issue that must be addressed to the satisfaction of the operating bodies. Sheets of bingo cards must be tamperproof, the identity of players and the accuracy of any sheet registration must always be available for immediate verification. In most cases gaming systems are required to place some form of restriction on the entry of minors. The present invention enables security measures to be employed that detect and avoid both fraud and misuse.
It is important to the credibility and reputation of a state or provincial lottery corporation that the television bingo game system operate reliably without error or detectable failure, particularly under the scrutiny of a large television audience. This invention seeks to maintain reliability through fault tolerant design and redundant system capabilities.
The number of potential bingo cards is over 244 quadrillion each with twenty five bingo numbers. Even with current technology it is uneconomical to store all the possible bingo cards for retrieval and play in a television bingo game. Players on the other hand expect their cards to be unique for every game, and to have an equal chance to play their card against any other card. Also, a bingo ball must be played against all the cards in play rapidly in the time it takes to select a bingo ball and show it to the audience and have them mark their cards. The algorithms that create and play the bingo cards must be perceived as being fair by the players and efficient by the bingo game organizers. The algorithms of this invention enable all bingo players to have unique cards and for the bingo cards to be processed in a timely fashion.
It is difficult in the standard weekly television bingo game to print a large assortment of different bingo cards. Standard bingo cards are printed in multiple similar copies from printing plates and then assembled together into sets for distribution to many locations marked for play on different nights. These bingo cards are used one time and then thrown away. This invention creates a unique bingo card that can be reused many times and need not be thrown away unless damaged.
With a mass television audience game show it is easily possible for 1,000,000 players with six bingo cards per sheet to be entered in a bingo game. Each single bingo card has 25 integers, thus a sheet of bingo cards consists of 150 integers. Each integer is stored as two bytes of data, totalling 300 bytes for one sheet of bingo cards. For 1,000,000 sheets of bingo cards, 300 Megabytes of uncompressed storage is required. This data of approximately 300 Megabytes is significant both to store and process in the time it takes to select and inform the audience of the next bingo ball. It is an objective of this invention to significantly reduce the data to be stored and processed.
The only family members interested in watching the current television bingo game shows are those individuals who have purchased a bingo card sometime during the previous week. Other family members are likely to want to watch a different television show since they have no reason to watch the televised bingo game. This significantly reduces the potential audience for the television game show and creates ill will within the family. The present invention seeks to create a family television game show that is of interest to all members of the family.
In the current versions of television bingo the organizers have no information concerning the individuals who are playing their bingo game since each card is purchased anonymously and used only once before being thrown away. Without having this information continuously available organizers cannot perform database operations such as: automatically award free games based on user criteria, recognize first time players, determine a player's frequency of play, eliminate name and other identification keystrokes, announce winners' names, bill credit accounts or verify who the winners are. This invention creates and uses computer databases to add new functionality to the playing of television bingo including the authorization of a player's on-site agent.
Current television bingo games generally do not accumulate data from successive bingo games. This lack of current and previous game statistics prohibits the announcers from providing meaningful commentary as the game progresses, which is of interest to most players. This invention collects and makes available current and historical game statistics.
In the current version of television bingo a large staff is required to provide the following functions: pick and display bingo balls, record the balls as picked, verify multiple winning bingo cards from player telephone calls, verify in the field the previous night's winners and award the prizes and finally distribute bingo cards to all the retailers for each game and collect the cash. As all of these functions must be physically carried out by staff it makes it difficult to operate a high frequency television bingo game. The present invention enables the television game to be operated automatically without staff.
The announcers and television bingo staff are generally volunteers without game show experience or television ability, which has a tendency to produce a non-professional, low entertainment value game show. The staff also doesn't have the ability to generate electronic tools such as animation, instant display screens, pseudo characters with computer generated voices, or fast automatic access to on-air interviews with winners. This invention eliminates the requirement for on-screen staff and provides computer generated functions that replace many human functions.
In many systems where entry and billing is by telephone the expense of live operators is required twenty four hours per day to manually acquire individuals names and place them in a text database. An announcer is also required to speak the individuals names, which inhibits the operation of a totally automated game show. This invention eliminates the requirement for most operator functions.
The market size of a television bingo game varies substantially from a small local municipality up to a national game show with massive entries. The speed of processing of an individual bingo ball however must remain roughly the same regardless of the size of game. The system must also be able to economically handle a varying number of telephone calls with acceptable call blockage to meet the market demands of different sized television bingo games. This invention provides a system to play television bingo that is flexible with the ability to play any size of bingo game.
Bingo is probably the best known game in the English speaking world. The problems described above have prevented bingo from becoming an entertaining game show for the whole family to play on a daily basis from any home that has a telephone and a television set. This invention addresses and removes such problems.